Holidailies 24: New Adult top 100 research: Time and Reviews

I’m back with more numbers to look at from my New Adult top 100 research. This time around I’m looking at Time and Reviews. I’ve found these very interesting to look at because they didn’t match what I would have expected.

So, going into this part of the research I expected two things:

– Best selling books have a lot of reviews

– Best selling books are either very new (having the first bump of sales) or older (having a steady sales record)

Since I only took one moment in time worth of information I can’t see the ebb and flow of these numbers but I can give you information about what was in the top 100 on the 20th of December.

Time

Time means how long it has been since the story has been published. This is interesting to see since it tells you how important a quick start is and how long you can expect to take before you really need a new book out.

This data would seem to advice to put out a book every 1 to 2 months if you want a stab at staying in the top 100.

Here is a break down of the data per month (no graphs this time):

1 m

2 m

3 m

4 m

5 m

6 m

7 m

8 m

9 m

10m

11m

12m

54

11

7

4

4

5

4

2

2

3

2

2

After 2 months only very few books stay (or get onto) the list. This has a lot do to with the sheer amount of New Adult books coming out and that a lot of New Adult authors output a lot of books.

Another type of data arrangement I found interesting was trying to spread the books equally over a certain amount of time. I know there is a significance of this, but I don’t know what it is any more (I took statistics, but that was 5 years ago, so I don’t remember everything any more).

1 week

1<2 weeks

2<4 weeks

1<3 months

4<6 months

6<12 months

20

14

20

18

14

14

I like this data arrangement a lot because it shows that there are about as many books on the list in their first week as there are in their 2 to 4 week range.

It seems that most of the books on the list are still in their first week, though they can range to up to a year.

Reviews

This one is closely connected to time because of the way I looked at this data. Plainly counting reviews is useless because some books have only been online for a day and some have been online for months. So instead I counted the reviews per day. To do this I took the amount of reviews and divided by the amount of days it had been published. This way each book would have the same chance (or as close to it as possible).

I did expect (as stated above) that books in the top 100 would have a lot of reviews, which would translate to a high reviews per day ratio.

This expectation was shattered as soon as I looked at the lowest and highest reviews per day count. This was staggering!

Lowest: 0.35 reviews per day. About 1 review per 3 days.

Highest: 282.5 reviews per day. About a review every 5 minutes!

I was surprised, to say the least. I thought that these two would just be outliers, that the most books would get at least 10 or so reviews a day. Well, one of them was an outlier, the other was simply part of reality.

Average: 12.45

Median: 4.49

Modal: 2

Okay, that list looks a lot less promising and in a way disappointing when compared to the lowest and highest rank. Here is the breakdown in useful data (the reason these ranges are not equal was because I found that there were a lot of books that got between 1 and 10 reviews a day (66 books in total), so I split that up more):

<1

1<2,5

2,5<5

5<7,5

7,5<10

10<15

15<20

20<30

30<40

40<

7

29

16

15

6

11

3

5

4

4

So, 7 of the books in the top 100 don’t even get 1 review a day. Yes, that is seven. The highest amount of reviews a day (282) does seem to be an outlier as only 4 books ever get more than 40 reviews a day.

Most books (52 in total) get less than 5 reviews per day. Most of them in the range between 1 and 2,5 reviews a day.

If you look at the data, there are almost as many people who get more than 30 reviews a day (8 total) as people who get less than 1 review a day (7 total). This is why the average is so high.

So, that is the info I have about time and reviews in the top 100. Are you surprised, or not surprised, by some of this data?

Do you have things you would like me to look at? You can find all the data I collected in the first post I made about this. Leave a reply with what you would like me to look at.